A hostile and no doubt completely garbled account of a talk at UCLA by Joseph Massad on David Horowitz's website, written by one of the ignoramuses employed by Campus Watch (I will not link to this article, but you can easily find it online), has gone viral on the right wing blogosphere, leading to countless accusations that an "Islamist" has again demonstrated his typical "homophobia." I've made my sharp disagreements with Massad very clear in the past, but I just can't let this pass without noting how incredibly idiotic and offensive this garbage really is.

For the past couple of months I have found myself unable to watch almost anything on my hundreds of worthless channels of cable television, including news and public affairs programming. The programs don't engage and the advertisements feel like a physical assault. There are rare exceptions, such as an occasional academic panel or political event on C-SPAN, and one or two other anomalies, but otherwise it's pretty unbearable.

An Ibishblog reader asks me, "Perhaps you would consider following up on your rather remarkable discourse on Hamlet with a defense of your (dubious) preference for David Lynch's feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me over the television series Twin Peaks?" I'm delighted to.

Among the most dangerous aspects of the political culture surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on both sides are glib assertions of inevitable victory and the uninterrogated assumptions that inevitably lie behind them. It's an obvious point, but was brought home to me with some force yesterday when a friend pointed out the following passage from a particularly foolish Arab-American blog:

I took advantage of this recent MLK Day long weekend to reread Hamlet in light of the fascinating conversation I had with Seth Duerr, Director of the York Shakespeare Company, in New York City a few weeks ago. Among the many things we agreed on was that our opinion of Hamlet was fairly unenthusiastic, at least in comparison to some of the rest of the Shakespeare canon and in comparison to the play's iconic cultural status.

The Arab-American community is routinely subjected to political nonsense on the Internet and in many other media and forums. The most damaging form of nonsense is not bad analysis or angry idiocy, damaging though that certainly is, but factual inaccuracy and blatant falsehoods that are all too common and create serious confusion and misapprehension. If we don't have our facts right, there is no hope of coming to an accurate analysis. Without an accurate analysis, there is no hope of coming up with a workable strategy to deal with a situation.

The Obama administration deserves credit and praise for its determination to push forward with Middle East peace diplomacy. It is very reassuring that the administration has not regarded the frustrations and false starts of 2009 as evidence that nothing can be accomplished or that efforts are being wasted. It is vital that the United States continue to pursue progress towards peace on a variety of fronts, including at the diplomatic register.

The new TSA security directive following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit raises the specter of ethnic and religious profiling in the most direct way since the 9/11 attacks. The first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that the primary blame for all kinds of negative fallout from terrorist attacks -- whether they succeed in killing the innocent or, as in this case, are simply a halfwit setting fire to his own trousers -- belongs squarely with the terrorists themselves and with their sympathizers.

Yesterday, Grand Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri passed away at his home in the Iranian holy city of Qom, without question delivering another serious blow to hopes for internal reform to the Iranian political system. Montazeri leaves behind him a decidedly mixed legacy, and a very interesting set of questions about the immediate and long-term consequences of his absence from the Iranian political scene.

After my recent posting about anti-Semitism in the Merchant of Venice and the Jew of Malta, I received a very kind invitation from Seth Duerr founder and director of the York Shakespeare Company which, I was surprised to learn, was staging rotating productions of the two plays at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan. I couldn't resist. Last weekend I went to New York, saw both productions and had an extremely enjoyable and interesting dinner with Mr. Duerr.